INK FIST blog

The College Era

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Hans Schumann

1988-2052

Standing in line at a Trinity
Lutheran pot luck, Hans held a tray balancing a plate, a soup bowl, and a glass
of ice tea. Two lines of church members, mostly old folks, hovered around a
long table covered from edge to edge with metal pans, foil pans, tupperware,
glassware, baskets, crock pots, and paper buckets.

He eyed the foods before him:
potato salad, egg salad, bean salad, salad salad, cole slaw, ham, garlic bread,
fried chicken, deviled eggs, bread pudding, barbecue ribs, two jellos (one red,
one green) containing grapes, apple slices, carrot shreds, and other
unidentifiable fruits, three casseroles—all of which looked the same before
serving spoons pierced cheese crust to reveal bizarre assortments of meats,
cheeses, and vegetables—and four types of brownies, of which the plastic-topped
pan of store-bought fudge brownies remained sadly whole, the chocolate’s shiny
surface unpunctured, until people got up for seconds.

None of it looked all that
appetizing, but Hans could already picture the grinning and the yawning and the
belly patting that would follow as the white-haired ladies and suspendered old
men grabbed their walkers and headed for the chapel for the weekly Lenten service.

The line inched along at a turtle’s
pace, people looking at the food and then each other and then the food like
they’d never seen the likes of it before and didn’t know what to pick first and
had to relearn how to plop a glob of whatever on their plate each time.

For better or for worse, these were
Hans’s people: the proud, stout German-American Lutherans with last names like
Weiss, Mueller, Friedrichs, Reinhardt, Dierdorf, Kohler, Gottfried. Not to
mention his own name. His mother (in line next to him) used to say how glad she
was to move back to the St. Louis area from Chicago—to hear those German names
again and see the shorter, rounder people (because the average Chicagoan is
lean, tall, and either Italian, Irish, or Polish). His uncle Karl (already
started on the oozing mush of egg and potato salads) liked to excuse his love
handles and double-chin by citing the Schumann family’s big-boned Bavarian
descent.

Sure, the Schumanns could trace
their lineage back to a little village in the Alps,
but if they ever actually visited the Fatherland as Hans had, they’d realize
how wholly American they were. Germans still knew how to walk places, how grow
produce without genetically engineered seeds and pesticides, how to finish
every slurp of every sauce on their plates instead of loading up a second
serving.

Finally seated, Hans took in the
scene. If, as his father’s stereotypes had it, Catholic suppers were raucous affairs
with dozens of kids running wild, then Lutheran suppers were the exact
opposite. These people—his people—were almost too meek to reproduce. Hans
attended Sunday school, starred in nativity plays, took confirmation classes,
joined the youth group. There were kids then, a few years ago. Not many, but a
few. Now they had vanished, as though they’d never been born.

Hans could not help but picture the
people that remained—these poor, pious souls—dying off one by one over the course
of the next ten, fifteen years from clogged arteries and lack of exercise.

As a lump of jello slid down his
throat, his mother talking weather to an old goat with a prosthetic hand, he
pictured the wooden double-doors to Trinity slamming shut for good. The plaster
statue of Christ gathering dust. The stained glass windows shattering at the
hands of vandals chucking tar-covered chunks of loose concrete.